Grants:Project/Rapid/UG GR/Corfupedia/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/UG GR/Corfupedia.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

The project started with great expectations, with goals to educate and inform the students about the cultural heritage of their island and to introduce students to Wikipedia and to train them in contributing to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. It was a large scale project with stakeholders from the User Group, many educational institutions and a large number of students. For most of the goals the project was succesful, with minor problems that taught us what to do and not to do in the future.

Through the feedback from the students and teachers we feel that most of them learned the basics about Wikipedia and loved the fact that their work is online and available to everybody in the web. Besides the wikimedians, the participants were 106 students, 4 teachers of informatics, 4 teachers of greek language and literature, 2 english language teachers, 2 french language teachers, and 1 german language teacher.

Students worked in teams with their teachers to create the content, using their school computer labs. There was a team of informatics course helping them, and wikipedians trained them on wiki editing through onsite workshops and online meetings through Skype. Due to the fact that the project was expanded to more school teams, and misunderstandings of the teachers, due to the fact that more overview would be needed, the flow of work was not executed entirely on wiki with each student having their own account. Thus, not every one of them edited Wikipedia to add their part on their own, although we did have very good quality articles with the contribution of many students.

Papers about the project were presented in three different conferences about education: International Conference on Educational Research; Patras (see Abstracts), 9th Panhellenic Congress for Informatics in Education; Syros (see programme), 3rd International Congress EEPEK; Larisa (see page 1 of the programme). The full text of the papers is going to be published online by the organisers of the conferences (Volume B, pp. 889-893 and Volume D, pp. 365-369). A paper was also approved at the International Conference of Educational Research (see pages 14-15 of the programme and the abstracts).

Also, the project was presented in Digifest Corfu Greece (see report in Greek), participated in the 1st Competition of Student Innovation in Corfu Greece, and got a Silver Award in Educational Business Awards 2017. (see announcement and photos; official webpage of the event)

So the project is felt successful between students and teachers, with mild success for our own goals and understandings as Wikimedians.

Corfupedia @ 1st Competition of Student Innovation in Corfu Greece
Corfupedia @ 1st Competition of Student Innovation in Corfu Greece

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Events	All the projected events have been done. The participating school teams were increased to 10 (from 5). The project has been awarded a Siver Award at the Education Business Awards 2017 [1].	There was a good distribution of individual roles and subprojects for the execution of the events and participation.
Number of participants (120 students)	106 students from 10 different schools + 18 educators and researchers (4 disciplines)	The project was expanded to 5 more schools but the sum of the student did not increase. While the teachers were very interested and enthusiastic in participating, probably because of the fact that they were also newbies did not help them pass their enthusiasm to all of their students.
Number of new editors (70)	60	While the number of the participants was a lot bigger, some of the students formed little teams to work their articles together offwiki and then they submitted their work with one account.
Number of articles created or improved	31 articles in 4 different languages	The participants cooperated to expand their articles, focusing less in the creation of new articles.
Number of repeat participants	All of the teachers and most of the students stayed in the project until the end of it.	We could not conclude to a good definition of what would be a 'repeat participant' and how to measure it.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?
- The coordination between the large number of students, teachers and volunteers - members of the Wikipedia organization was the most astonishing accomplishment of this project.
- The Greek educational system generally does not give the necessary tools to teachers in order to cooperate on large projects. Also teachers from different fields cannot find easily a common subject to work on a project. Corfupedia managed to join these two parameters. All of the teachers were so pleased with the result that would be pleased to continue Corfupedia in the next year or follow a similar project using Wikipedia as their main tool.
What did not worked so well?
- The fact that many teachers were not familiar with wiki editing had as a result the slow growth of the project.
- While the teachers were very interested and enthusiastic in participating, probably because of the fact that they were also newbies themselves did not help them explain things and pass their enthusiasm to all of their students but to only a part of them.
- Some of the students formed little teams to work their articles together offwiki, and then they submitted their work with one account instead of creating an account each one of them. This seems to have happened because they were used in this way from their usual joined assignments at school. We should explain it better in the webinars and workshops and do more of them to each of the school teams, and not rely on their teachers' guidance if the teachers are also newbies.
- Some of the teachers felt that they were going well with the project when their students were learning, covering their educational goals, and not paying enough attention to our own goals about creating articles and get Wikipedia training.
- The expansion to more school teams divided the time for workshops and webinars and the number of them for each school. With the final number of schools we made 10 workshops and 10 webinars, which is 1+1 for each school while the initial plan would allow us to do 2+2 for each of the 5 schools.
- Also students contacted a research with a questionnaire at the start of the project but they didn’t had the appropriate time to send a second questionnaire at the end of the project in order to study the results Corfupedia. The questionnaire is going to take place on October of 2017 (the next school year).
What would you do differently next time ?
- The project started a liitle bit late during the 2016-2017 school year. It is recommened project with such complexity as Corfupedia to be organized at the end of the previous year or during summer vacations and to start on September or early October.
- It is recommented to run the program in one or two (including Commons) projects, instead of five projects, in order to keep track of the activity of the participants and to be easy to gather metrics about the results.
- Also, it is recommented that any expansion in the number of teams/schools should consider the availability of the volunteer mentors for more workshops and webinars.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

No	Category	Amount approved	Amount spent
1	Print materials	€100.00	€101.10
2	Swags	N/A	N/A
3 4 5 6 7	Soft drinks Bottles of water Snacks Plastic cups Rolls of paper	€30.00 €20.00 €44.00 €2.00 €6.00	€146.99
8	Registration fees for EEPEK	€90.00	€90.00
9	Registration fees for 9th Panhellenic Congress in Syros	€40.00	€40.00
10	Incidentals	€78.00	see 2-7
Total		€410.00	€378.09

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

We have €31.91 remaining. We would like to use them in an event in Thessaloniki scheduled for October 7 and that would include edithon and hackathon for newcomers and female editors.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of €31.91 were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/UG_GR/WikiFemHack.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project? Based on our experience from this project (do and don't) we endorse the followin Learning patterns: